SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1550 (11), Wednesday, February 24, 2010
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TITLE: Vigil Set Up To Stop Demolition Of Building
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A round-the-clock vigil has been established in central St. Petersburg by concerned locals attempting to prevent the demolition of a historic building.
Defenders of St. Petersburg’s cultural heritage set up camp near the Rogov House on the corner of Zagorodny Prospekt and Shcherbakov Pereulok as attempts to demolish the building continued during the weekend and into this week.
At every attempt by workers to start demolition, which the protesters describe as “illegal,” the activists called the police, who repeatedly came and stopped the work because the workers had no demolition permit.
But the workers, equipped with a hydraulic excavator labeled “Building Demolition Association,” managed to almost completely destroy the top floor of the three-story historic building in one sweep on Saturday and two sweeps on Monday.
On Saturday, two cars parked on Shcherbakov Pereulok were reported to have been damaged by falling stones due to the haste with which the work was carried out. After the third sweep on Monday, the workers present at the site were detained by the police, who ordered them to write explanatory statements.
The protesters say that Prestizh, which bought the right to develop the site from the city, deliberately started demolition work at the beginning of the long holiday weekend in order to complete demolition unhindered before Wednesday, when a court hearing about the legality of stripping the the Rogov House of its cultural heritage status is scheduled.
Prestizh is planning to build a seven-story business center with underground parking on the site.
The Rogov House, named after the merchant who built it in the late 18th to early 19th century, is the oldest building on Vladimirskaya Ploshchad. Located next to the Delvig House, it is valued as a relic of Pushkin-era St. Petersburg.
“The exact year of construction is unknown, which is often the case with buildings from that era,” Alexander Kononov, deputy chairman of the St. Petersburg branch of the Russian Association for the Protection of Monuments (VOOPIK,) said by phone on Tuesday.
“It was built between 1798 and 1808, because on the 1798 map of St. Petersburg this building isn’t yet featured, but it is already on the 1808 map of St. Petersburg — with the same dimensions and configuration as it has now.”
According to Kononov, the building is the oldest in the Vladimirskaya Ploshchad ensemble — older than the Delvig House, which was built from 1811 to 1813 — and, unlike the Delvig House, it has never undergone major renovation or reconstruction work.
“It has all the authentic elements of construction and decor inside and out — the staircase and everything — including large wooden cross-beams,” he said.
“It is precisely as it was built, except for minor changes on the first floor due to doorways having been moved.”
The Rogov House has been under threat since the 1980s, when it was damaged during the construction of Dostoyevskaya metro station. Kononov insists that the building could have been restored, but City Hall’s heritage committee stripped it off its heritage status in November last year.
According to Kononov, organizations such as Lenmetrogiprotrans (Leningrad Metropolitan State Institute for Transportation Design and Planning) and Giprostroimost (Institute for Bridge Design and Construction) said in writing that they were ready to design projects for the repair and preservation of the building, including strengthening weight-bearing structures and the foundations.
“Unfortunately, Prestizh, which currently manages the site, doesn’t want to get in touch with the organizations that are ready to preserve the building — quite the opposite, they look for experts who will say that it is impossible to preserve the building and that it is in a dangerous state of repair,” Kononov said.
Prestizh was not available for comment on Tuesday.
According to the preservationist organization Living City, more than 100 historic buildings have been destroyed in the center, including six on Nevsky Prospekt, St. Petersburg’s main thoroughfare, since Governor Valentina Matviyenko took office in 2003.
TITLE: Medvedev Begins Sweeping Police Reforms
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev last week pressed ahead with a drive for reforms in the scandal-plagued Interior Ministry, ordering sweeping personnel cuts in the ministry’s massive bureaucracy and promising harsh punishments for police who break the law.
At a meeting with top Interior Ministry officials, Medvedev said he had ordered the number of personnel at the ministry’s head office to be halved to about 10,000. He also dismissed two deputy interior ministers and 16 senior police officials.
Medvedev vowed to take personal control of the reforms and said the wave of violent crimes committed by police officers over the past year had “eroded” the authority of police.
“A series of incidents has caused a strong public reaction, eroding the authority of the Interior Ministry and its personnel,” Medvedev said. “The responsibility of Interior Ministry personnel on all levels will be tightened up.”
He said he had given Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev one month to formulate measures to combat police abuses and attract better recruits to the police force.
Critics have dismissed previous attempts to implement police reforms as half-hearted and superficial, but the personnel cuts announced by Medvedev on Thursday were far from minor. He fired two of Nurgaliyev’s deputies — Nikolai Ovchinnikov and Arkady Yevdeleyev — and replaced them with senior members of the presidential administration: Sergei Gerasimov and Sergei Bulavin.
The move indicates that Medvedev may be trying to install his own people in key positions in law enforcement agencies. Bulavin is a former police general, while Gerasimov worked as a deputy prosecutor general before joining the presidential administration.
Medvedev also sacked the top police officials in eight regions and replaced them with new appointees.
Former police general Alexei Volkov, a State Duma deputy with the ruling United Russia party, told The St. Petersburg Times on Thursday that the political will exists to carry out substantive reforms. “There is an … understanding that doing nothing is not an option,” said Volkov, deputy head of the Duma’s security committee who attended Thursday’s meeting with Medvedev.
A poll released by the respected Levada Center this week showed that more than two-thirds of Russians do not trust police.
A supermarket shooting rampage last year by Moscow police major Denis Yevsukov, who killed two and injured seven, has become the most egregious example of police abuse over the last year. But reports of police harassment, violence and corruption are routine.
Medvedev told Thursday’s meeting that the authorities had opened about 15,000 criminal cases involving corruption, but that the figure was “just the tip of the iceberg.”
Nurgaliyev, meanwhile, told Thursday’s meeting that police officers themselves are increasingly being threatened with violence and blackmail by civilians. The ministry’s internal affairs department received more than 1,000 complaints from police officers last year involving purported crimes committed against them by citizens, Nurgaliyev said.
Experts and police officers themselves say meager police salaries breed corruption, and Medvedev on Thursday said salaries would be boosted for police officers, who earn on average anywhere between $300 and $660 per month, depending on their region.
As part of the reforms, the Interior Ministry will also transfer the country’s network of drunk tanks to the Health and Social Development Ministry.
TITLE: Blind Eye Turned to Counterfeit Cell Phones
AUTHOR: By Alex Anishyuk
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — It’s a typical sight at many of Russia’s electronics markets: a 3,000 ruble Blackberry, a gold-plated Nokia and an iPhone with a television antenna.
Counterfeit and other illegal mobile phones have been flooding into the country, but while law enforcement, mobile providers and phone makers have all pledged to tackle the problem, illegal mobile phones continue to be openly sold in most electronics markets with impunity.
Counterfeit phones currently make up 2 percent to 3 percent of the Russian market, according to estimates by Mobiset.ru, a telecoms portal. Total contraband phones, a category that includes both counterfeit and authentic phones that have been smuggled into the country, account for about half of all mobile phones currently sold in Russia.
Counterfeit phones are pouring into the country almost exclusively from China, giving consumers the option of choosing anything from a cheap, disposable knockoff to a high-quality reproduction at a fraction of the price.
Counterfeit mobiles can be divided into three main groups, ranging from low-quality knockoffs to exact copies of the latest models, said Eldar Murtazin, editor of telecoms portal Mobile Review.
“The first category are mobile gadgets that are labeled ‘Nukua’ or something that sounds like a well-known brand and can only be mistaken as genuine from a distance,” he said.
“The second type is a more precise copy, which looks much like the original one and has an official logo, but offers a primitive interface. You can also find a high-quality fakes made of decent materials, using exact copies of the original microchips and even screws.”
The last group includes the exact replicas, which have the unit’s original software installed and for which the only visible difference from the original is the price — which is several times lower.
Moscow’s markets are flooded with the imitations, ranging from cheap knockoffs with “enhancements” added, to jewel-studded luxury brands.
“Here’s one that looks exactly like an iPhone 3G. It costs 3,400 rubles ($114), but I can give you a small discount if you take the memory card too,” said Sergei, a salesman from Savyolovsky Market, who pointed to iPhone-like gadgets, all of which sported a small, sliding television antenna and slots for two SIM cards — options that a real iPhone 3G doesn’t have.
Sergei, who wouldn’t give his last name because of the illegal nature of his enterprise, also offered a more expensive model that was labeled as containing 32 gigabytes of memory. But it only works well with 16 gigabytes, the salesman said, advising a reporter not to “put too much memory in, or it will freeze up.”
Both phones had the Apple logo, but fine print on the back read, “Designed by Cpple in California, made in China,” an apparent attempt by the manufacturer to protect itself from trademark lawsuits.
A spokeswoman for Apple Europe wouldn’t give an estimate for how much the company loses from fakes or say whether the company is fighting the illegal trade at all.
Sellers say China is the sole source of counterfeit mobile handsets that make it to Moscow markets.
“I don’t really know who manufactures these ‘masterpieces,’” Sergei said, “but they are assembled in China where there are numerous illegal factories.”
The factories technically operate underground, but look like legal assembly lines, said Murtazin, who recently visited a factory near Guangzhou, an industrial Chinese city near Hong Kong.
“The manufacturers work illegally and are sometimes raided by the police, but they still manage to function normally,” he said. “I remember trying to take pictures in Guangzhou at a shopping center where they sell these fakes, but they thought I was from an international phone company, and the guide told me to delete the pictures if I wanted to leave the market unharmed.”
Other knockoffs run the gamut from the absurd to the gaudy.
Another salesman at Savyolovsky was selling a so-called iPhone 2G, a replica of the original iPhone — only half the size. “We call it a mini-iPhone, a good present for a lady. Only 4,600 rubles!” he said.
A Vertu Ascent Ferrari 1947 Limited Edition, which is on sale for 7,480 euros ($10,500) in an official Vertu shop in Moscow, is on sale for just 8,000 rubles in Gorbushkin Dvor, a market in the west of Moscow.
“Few would spot the difference. Look, ours has leather, titanium and looks exactly the same. So why pay more?” a seller said.
A Nokia 8800 with rhinestones and fake gold-plating, selling for 3,000 rubles instead of the 70,000 to 80,000 ruble price tag for a genuine model, and a phone resembling a Blackberry but labeled as “Bloakberry” were the “hot sales hits,” another seller at Savyolovsky said.
“Counterfeit phones are one of our most serious problems,” Viktoria Yeremina, a spokeswoman at Nokia Eurasia, said in e-mailed comments. “They not only damage the brand, but they can be dangerous for users,” she said.
“We have a special team working in China, and we also fight bootlegged goods in other countries, and naturally, in Russia.”
Spokespeople for Vertu and Research in Motion could not be reached for comment.
It’s unclear how much help the phone makers are getting from Russian law enforcement agencies, however, as two Interior Ministry departments each said the other was responsible for dealing with trafficking in illegal smartphones.
“We can’t assign a police officer to every salesman of illegal goods. This simply won’t work,” said Andrei Pilipchuk, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry’s economic security department. “We curb the channels of illegal supplies on a strategic level.”
“Illegal dealers bribe officials at customs and import whatever they want, whether it be phones or other gadgets, in containers that might be listed, for example, as ‘clothes’ in customs forms,” he said.
Plipchuk directed all further questions to the Interior Ministry’s “K” department, which is tasked with dealing with high-tech crimes.
A spokeswoman for department “K” said only that the department didn’t deal with illegally imported smartphones and directed all further questions back to the economic security department.
If a smartphone makes it through the border, it is as good as sold, so the most effective way to curtail the sale of counterfeit phones is at the border.
The Federal Customs Service discovered 7 million units of counterfeit goods and initiated more than 1,000 legal cases countrywide in the first two weeks of 2010 alone, said a spokesman for the customs service, who declined to be identified. He did not say how many of these cases involved counterfeit phones.
“Counterfeit phones are usually smuggled in peoples’ luggage in batches that rarely exceed 200 to 300 units, which on average are valued at 600,000 to 2 million rubles ($20,000 to $66,700),” the spokesman said.
In every shipment that crosses the border, customs officials crosscheck the names of the product and the importer with a database to confirm that the importer is officially accredited by the manufacturer to sell the goods in Russia.
“In some cases when we have doubts, we detain the goods and consult the manufacturer to find out whether the goods are of legal origin,” he said.
But heading off all illegal phones at the border runs the risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
The introduction of the iPhone 3G into Russia has been pushed back several times because of customs problems. Last month, RIA-Novosti quoted sources close to mobile operators as saying new customs regulations were hampering the introduction of Apple’s smartphone on the Russian market.
According to new customs regulations that went into force on Jan. 1, importers of radios and other electronic devices must get licenses and inform the Federal Security Service if the devices have encoding functions.
Theoretically, it should be easier to curtail the counterfeit phone trade at the point of sale. But unlike smuggling, which is easy to prove and get a court ruling on, selling counterfeit phones falls under various different articles of the Administrative and Criminal codes, and it is difficult to successfully prosecute such cases, lawyers say.
“The police say they lack expertise to differentiate between the fake smartphones and the genuine ones, which could be true in the case of high-tech sophisticated falsifications,” said Oleg Moskvitin, a senior lawyer with Muranov, Chernyakov & Partners. “But most Chinese fakes have defects, or, alternatively, have an abundance of functions that the original model does not offer, so in most cases it is easy to track those.”
Even if law enforcement agencies did crack down on illegal phone retailers, it would be a piecemeal effort, requiring them to prosecute individual sellers rather than the markets at which they are sold.
“The trade center itself does not sell mobiles — they lease properties to tenants who may be honest businessmen or may not be,” Moskvitin said. “The news of a ‘piracy orgy’ on the territory of a trade center or a market creates reputational and political risks, rather than legal risks, which, however, may result in the closure of the property, as was the case with the old Gorbushka.”
Gorbushka, a chaotic outdoor weekend flea market near the Gorbunov recreation center in the west of Moscow was closed in 2001 after an anti-piracy campaign orchestrated by city authorities, but a new modern trade center with the same name was soon opened nearby.
The most effective tool to fight counterfeit phones is in the hands of mobile operators, but they have good reason to be cautious about using it.
All legally produced phones are hardwired with an International Mobile Equipment Identity, a unique code assigned to each device, which would allow operators to immediately detect when a call was placed from an illegal phone.
In December, mobile operators in India blocked all phones that didn’t have an IMEI code, rendering useless most counterfeit phones.
But to do so would not necessarily be in the interest of Russian operators, who would in effect be switching off many of their subscribers.
“The problem is that phone operators have a greater interest in getting as many subscribers as possible and they don’t care about the fakes,” said Sergei Vasin, a telecommunications analyst at Metropol.
Mobile operators say they are against the use of illegal phones, as they can damage the operators’ networks, but that they cannot solve the problem on their own.
“It is impossible to fight [the illegal trade] with the resources of the mobile operators alone,” Ksenia Korneyeva, a spokesperson for Beeline, said in e-mailed comments.
She said blocking illegal phones by tracking their IMEI could be a useful tool, but doesn’t yet look like a realistic option.
“We should first work out the technical procedure necessary to carry out this plan, as well as the logistics and the areas of responsibility,” she said.
“Of course, phone handsets can be identified by their IMEI codes, and it is logical that one IMEI should correspond to one particular phone. But sometimes phones can be cloned, in which case a large number of devices are assigned one IMEI,” she said.
But while mobile operators and law enforcement agencies mull over how best to deal with the issue, sellers don’t appear to be worried about any possible dangers to their business.
One retailer of illegal phones at Savyolovsky brushed off concerns about the legality of his trade. “If everyone here is doing it, then it must be OK.”
TITLE: Gergiev Takes New Job As Dean at University
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Valery Gergiev, the award-winning artistic director of the Mariinsky Theater, has accepted a proposal from the St. Petersburg State University to become dean of its newly created arts faculty.
Earlier this month, the university’s academic council voted to divide the school’s philology and arts faculty into two separate faculties. Gergiev was offered the dean’s position at the arts faculty, while Lyudmila Verbitskaya, the former rector of the university and its current president, was invited to head the philology faculty.
Critics say Gergiev will struggle to fulfill any commitments to the university in view of the Mariinsky’s time-consuming schedule and extensive touring, not to mention Gergiev’s own engagements with other orchestras.
Gergiev holds the post of principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. He is also a regular guest conductor with a number of other ensembles, including the Wiener Philharmoniker, the Orchestra of the Teatro alla Scala and the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra.
Under Gergiev’s leadership, the Mariinsky gives around 600 performances a year, both at home and abroad, with the maestro himself conducting almost 300 concerts and shows.
Gergiev said through his press service that he had accepted the proposal from the university as he was convinced that “one of the top priorities of our era is to create new possibilites for students to get closer to the wonderful world of art.”
At the Mariinsky, the maestro traditionally devotes special attention to programs targeting children and young people. Gergiev has revived the practices of season tickets — at discounted prices — for these groups, and of staging free concerts for students.
“It is essential to create optimal conditions for the fundamental study of culture in all its complexity, with its modern trends and centuries-old traditions,” Gergiev said.
Sergei Bogdanov, the current dean of the philology faculty of St. Petersburg State University, said he believed Gergiev is an ideal candidate for the job.
“Gergiev’s intellectual and artistic potential is enormous, and it would be excellent news for us to have him,” Bogdanov told reporters on Tuesday, prior to the appointment. “He would be the perfect asset.”
TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: Premiere Canceled
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The premiere of the Mikhailovksy Theater’s new production was canceled Thursday due to a bomb threat.
The premiere of “The Hebrewess” was postponed after a man made an anonymous phone call to the theater at 5.30 p.m. on Thursday, according to a statement released by the theater later that evening. The man said, “So it’s the premiere of ‘The Yid’ today, is it? Your theater will blow up before the beginning of the show.”
The police were immediately informed about the phone call and at 6.40 p.m. a bomb disposal squad arrived with sniffer dogs. They made the decision to cancel the performance and evacuate the audience. The premiere took place the next day.
New Theater Stage
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A new stage of the Molodezhny Theater on the Fontanka Embankment opened last week, Interfax reported. The opening ceremony last weekend marked the end of renovations to the Letny Theater building, which began in December 2006.
“Today, new life is being breathed into this corner of St. Petersburg,” Governor Valentina Matviyenko said in a speech at the ceremony.
TITLE: Jobless Rate
At New High, Up 9.2 Percent
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: The unemployment rate jumped last month to the highest since March as companies struggled to raise new capital and cut costs by firing staff, the State Statistics Service in Moscow said Thursday.
The jobless rate rose to 9.2 percent, matching the level reached last March, from 8.2 percent in December, the service said. The median estimate of nine economists in a Bloomberg survey was 8.5 percent.
Unemployment having risen for a fourth month in January threatens to subdue consumer spending and mute a recovery that boosted retail sales last month for the first time in a year as industrial production rose at the fastest rate since April 2008.
“The worst may be over, but a full recovery may be long and unsteady,” ING Groep said in a research note published Feb. 15. “Unemployment remains high and is unlikely to drop in 2010. As public wages are frozen, real wages are unlikely to increase by much. This points to a very gradual recovery in domestic demand, which may even shrink a bit.”
TITLE: Tax Benefits Proposed For Tech Investors
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia may offer tax benefits for companies that invest in technology and for some energy projects to create future sources of revenue, the Finance Ministry said.
The ministry is considering the “appropriateness” of waving the extraction tax for energy companies working in the Arctic Yamalo-Nenets region from next year, according to the ministry’s tax plan for 2011-2013.
“We are creating a post-crisis model for the development of the Russian economy,” Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said at a ministerial meeting on the tax proposals Friday in Moscow. “Tax policy in the medium turn must take into account the lessons of the crisis.”
Russia, the world’s largest energy supplier, has struggled for years to cut its dependence on oil and gas sales, which accounted for more almost 70 percent of exports to the Baltic states and countries outside of the former Soviet Union. Russia must find “new sources of growth,” Kudrin said.
The Finance Ministry is considering a “long-term” shift toward a more profit-based tax system for energy companies and away from the current system, which targets export revenue, according to the document.
The gas extraction tax may also be raised and linked to the annual movements of domestic gas prices, the ministry said. Smaller oil fields with “insignificant” initial extraction levels may also be taxed at a lower rate than they are now, according to the documents.
The economy contracted a record 7.9 percent last year as the government posted a budget deficit of 5.9 percent of gross domestic product, its first shortfall in a decade. Last year’s 83 percent surge in the price of Urals crude, Russia’s chief export blend, narrowed that gap from an initially forecast deficit of 8.3% of GDP.
TITLE: ‘Merry Gnome’ Suffers Over Presidential Visit
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Officials in Omsk hastily removed a theater poster reading, “We Await You, Merry Gnome,” ahead of President Dmitry Medvedev’s visit to the Siberian city last week, the Novy Region web site reported Thursday.
The poster, which advertised a children’s play, was located on a street that Medvedev’s convoy was to use on the way to a local refinery, the report said. It was unclear exactly why the poster might have been removed, though Novy Region suggested that officials may have been afraid of offending Medvedev, whose height has been estimated in the media at 162 centimeters.
Citing Omsk bloggers and journalists, Novy Region reported that the local officials had demonstrated great zeal last week to make Medvedev comfortable during his visit. In one example, security officials prevented pedestrians from crossing a street for 40 minutes in punishingly cold weather while waiting for Medvedev’s motorcade to pass, the web site said.
Businesses located along the roads that Medvedev was to travel on were ordered to remove all sidewalk advertisement stands as well as piles of dirty snow and ice, Novy Region reported.
In some places, the sidewalks were covered with fresh, clean snow brought in from outside the city, the report said.
TITLE: Torrents.ru Web Site Closed
AUTHOR: By Maria Antonova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Prosecutors shut down the Torrents.ru web site on Thursday after accusing Russia’s most popular BitTorrent tracker of breaching intellectual property rights.
Domain registrar Ru-Center blocked the site after being requested to do so by Moscow’s Chertanovsky district branch of the Investigative Committee.
A statement on the registrar’s web site said the domain had been blocked, as prosecutors had launched criminal proceedings against the site. Torrents.ru is suspected of violating an article in the Criminal Code, allowing for a punishment of two years in prison for violations of intellectual property rights.
“We have taken several dozen sites offline in the past for pornography or extremism, but this is the first time we have done it for [violating] intellectual property rights,” said Andrei Vorobyov, a spokesman for Ru-Center. He cited Ingushetia.ru, an opposition news portal accused in 2007 of inciting interethnic hatred, as an example of another domain that was taken offline on orders from the authorities.
BitTorrent trackers facilitate the sharing of files, including films and music, among users by connecting users with hundreds of other computers, which collectively transfer the needed file to the downloader’s computer.
Torrents.ru took the news in stride Thursday night, announcing a new address for its torrent service and instructing users on how to switch over to the new site.
The web site said users hoping to continue sharing files would have to indicate a different tracker (a server which connects downloaders with other users that have the needed file) or download the files from the site’s new domain, Rutracker.org.
Users of the service were circulating a petition to President Dmitry Medvedev on the web site’s forum Thursday night, calling on him to reopen the web site and prosecute the investigators, who they said overstepped their authority and hurt more than 4 million users.
Torrents.ru is Russia’s largest torrent service, ranked by Alexa.com as the 13th most-visited site in the .ru domain.
The Investigative Committee could not be reached for comment Thursday.
Pirated media content has been a contentious issue during Russia’s WTO accession, and AllofMP3.com, a major music downloading web site, was forced to close that year after several court proceedings and a copyright infringement lawsuit.
TITLE: Clinton Urges Russia to Cooperate With NATO on Missile Defense
AUTHOR: By Indira A.R. Lakshmanan
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: WASHINGTON — U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called on Russia to collaborate with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on the missile defense of Europe and in preventing the spread of nuclear weapons.
“While Russia faces challenges to its security, NATO is not among them,” Clinton said in Washington yesterday. “We want a cooperative NATO-Russia relationship that produces concrete results and draws NATO and Russia closer.”
Her comments came NATO representatives convene a meeting today to discuss updating the “strategic concept” of the 61-year-old military alliance among the U.S., Europe and Canada.
“Just as Russia is an important partner in efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation, so should it be in missile defense,” she said in remarks at an event hosted by the Atlantic Council, a Washington policy group.
Clinton urged Russia to be part of the discussion of missile defense for Europe during a stop last month in Paris. “Missile defense, we believe, will make this continent a safer place,” Clinton said then. “That safety could extend to Russia, if Russia decides to cooperate with us.”
Asked by an audience member yesterday if she could imagine Russia someday becoming part of NATO, she replied, “I can imagine it but I’m not sure the Russians can imagine it.”
In her prepared remarks, Clinton called terrorist attacks and nuclear proliferation the “key challenges” to NATO, which she called the “most successful alliance in history.”
“The danger of a nuclear attack from a non-state actor has increased,” she said. She also said that missile development by North Korea and Iran “are reviving the specter of an interstate nuclear attack.”
Clinton called for NATO allies to focus on emerging threats, including cyber warfare, and to cooperate with private industry in protecting computer networks and energy infrastructure.
“Threats to our networks and infrastructure such as cyber attacks and energy disruptions” will require “close cooperation with the private sector,” she said. “The Alliance has taken preliminary steps such as agreeing to a cyber defense policy. But we must continue to keep pace with the evolution of these emerging dangers.”
TITLE: Matviyenko Uses Official Site to Defend Son
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A scandal is brewing over the alleged involvement of businessman Sergei Matviyenko, the only son of St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko, in the closure of Khasansky market.
After businessman Yevgeny Abrazheyev, the general director of the market, gave revealing interviews to local media in which he suggested that the market’s troubles had begun after he refused to sell the business to Sergei Matviyenko, it was City Hall’s press office that fired back.
In interviews with local media, Sergei Matviyenko dismissed accusations he had masterminded the closure of Khasansky market, which could leave about 400 local entrepreneurs out of work, and called the critical reports a “deliberate provocation” and “total nonsense.”
Yet the businessman’s mother seemingly decided his efforts were not enough, and brought out the heavy artillery via her own office.
The officials were particularly irked by a double-page spread devoted to the Khasansky market conflict in the pages of local business newspaper Devoloi Peterburg published on Feb. 11.
“Recently we have noticed a strange obsession in Devoloi Peterburg newspaper, which mentions the name of the governor’s son, Sergei Matviyenko, in its pages,” reads the first line of the official statement published on City Hall’s web site. The statement goes on to accuse the newspaper of biased reporting, claiming that Khasansky market has in recent years become synonymous with counterfeit goods.
“Take just one routine check that was carried out on June 26, 2009. The police raided Khasansky market and discovered dozens of examples of Chinese-made children’s toys without any accompanying safety certificates,” reads the city government’s press release. “On the same day, the police confiscated counterfeit goods worth 741,000 rubles ($25,000) and detained 76 employees of the market who had violated immigration rules.”
The political opposition was astounded to see the government machinery being used to campaign to clear the image of Sergei Matviyenko, who is not employed by City Hall. Human rights advocates have pointed out that libel issues and any questions requiring corrections to be published by the media are settled privately or in court.
“What we are seeing is the blatant use by civil servants of the government machine to support political allies and family members,” said Boris Vishnevsky, a political analyst and member of the political council of the local branch of the democratic Yabloko party.
“This is nothing less than the exploitation of ‘administrative resources’ — the use of unlimited bureaucratic power to push for decisions benefiting a narrow circle in the political elite and the ability to boundlessly brainwash the Russian people through any information channels available.”
TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: Ukraine Pipeline Plans
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Gazprom will consider Ukrainian President-elect Viktor Yanukovych’s proposal to share ownership of his country’s pipeline system, Deputy Chief Executive Officer Alexander Medvedev told Russia Today, according to an e-mailed statement from the state-run broadcaster.
“We’re looking to see in which form this project will be proposed,” Medvedev said, according to the statement. Gazprom will still go ahead with its Nord Stream and South Stream pipelines bypassing Ukraine, he said.
Yanukovych said last week that he plans to propose a gas group with Russia and the European Union to upgrade Ukraine’s pipeline network.
RusAl to Boost Output
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — United Co. RusAl, the world’s biggest aluminum producer, will increase output this year, having seen “the first signs of a recovery” after the global recession. The shares rose the most since their trading debut.
Production will increase 3 percent this year compared with 2009, the Moscow-based company said Monday in a statement to the Hong Kong exchange. Output slumped 11 percent to 3.9 million metric tons last year.
“We are seeing the first signs of a recovery in demand as more countries emerge from recession,” Oleg Deripaska, chief executive officer of RusAl, said in the statement. Orders from European and U.S. clients are rising, it said.
Customs Union Loser
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Kazakhstan may lose 70 billion tenge ($474 million) a year when the former Soviet republic joins a customs union with Russia and Belarus, Novosti-Kazakhstan reported.
The government must find alternative sources of income, said lawmaker Gulzhana Karagusova, the Astana-based news service reported Monday.
The union will start on July 1 after the countries approve a customs code, Novosti-Kazakhstan said.
Kazakhstan Aims High
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Kazakhstan, the biggest energy producer in central Asia, plans to raise gross domestic product by 50 percent over six years through investment in industrial projects, Industry and Trade Minister Aset Isekeshev said.
The nation also plans to boost labor productivity by as much as 100 percent through 2014, compared with 2008, Isekeshev told the Cabinet in Astana on Tuesday, according to a statement on the government web site. He didn’t elaborate on the projects.
Kazakhstan’s National Wellbeing Fund Samruk-Kazyna plans to invest in 30 industrial projects at a cost of $23 billion, Chief Executive Officer Kairat Kelimbetov said on Feb.18, according to Novosti-Kazakhstan. The projects are due for completion by 2015, the Astana-based news service reported.
Raiffeisen Eyes Merger
VIENNA (Bloomberg) — Raiffeisen International Bank-Holding, the Austrian lender that operates in 17 former communist countries in eastern Europe, is considering a merger with its majority shareholder.
The boards of Raiffeisen International and Raiffeisen Zentralbank Oesterreich are evaluating a combination of the two companies as “one of several strategic options,” the Vienna-based company said in a statement Monday. “No official decisions have been made.”
TITLE: In the Spotlight: A VIP Visit to Russia
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Last week, Hollywood actor Ashton Kutcher came to Moscow to talk about Twitter with top Kremlin officials and businessmen. On Thursday, he revealed — on Twitter, of course — that the Russians “want to do biz.”
Pretty-boy actor Kutcher is perhaps better known for being married to Demi Moore than for his television and film work. He is one of the famous people who sacrifice their mystique by typing every half-baked idea they ever have on Twitter — sorry, embrace new technologies to communicate with their fans. To be fair, he probably wouldn’t know how to spell mystique anyway.
Most famously, he once posted a picture of “wifey” Demi Moore bending over in a white bikini, and the couple sometimes communicates via Twitter from different rooms of their mansion.
In preparation for his Moscow trip, he posted an out-of-focus photo of himself in a fur hat and asked for useful phrases. Predictably, someone thought it would be funny to tell him that an entirely unprintable phrase is the way to offer a cheery good morning.
Life News raved over the fact that Kutcher, who arrived Wednesday, didn’t insist on a stretch limo and traveled in a bus with his U.S. colleagues. It also pointed out that he didn’t bother to bring his fur hat after all.
The most enjoyable thing about the visit has been the po-faced way in which serious publications have covered it. Vedomosti business daily covered the visit with a long article about electronic government and other buzz words, but somehow didn’t get around to mentioning Kutcher, whose oeuvre such as “Dude, Where’s My Car?” probably doesn’t even make its culture pages.
Finally I tracked him down in a long list of the participants, where Vedomosti refers to him as the founder of the DNA Foundation to fight human trafficking, but doesn’t mention his acting.
In more Twitter breaking news, U.S. reality-TV star Tila Tequila has been writing about her plans to adopt a Russian orphan.
She wrote on Feb. 15 that she is about to adopt a boy from an orphanage in Russia, a country that she perceptively describes as “very cold” and “dark.” She has already picked out the authentically Slavic name Jayden for him — although she doesn’t seem too sure of his exact age, calling him two or three — and is decorating his bedroom “with a toy-car bed and blue walls.”
It’s heartwarming stuff, although it’s a little disturbing how she juxtaposes posts about the adoption and her “superduper sexy MILF photo shoot.”
The story has provoked predictable headlines in Russia — “A porn model is adopting a child from Russia,” Utro.ru wrote, juxtaposing a photograph of Tequila’s cleavage with a crying baby’s face.
Tequila starred in MTV’s show “A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila,” in which straight men and lesbians competed for a place in her bed. Rather surprisingly, the show used to air dubbed on Russian MTV without a peep of protest, perhaps because it was on after the bedtime of the usual protesters from religious right organizations.
Tequila writes that she has been approved by the adoption agency and that she is going to visit Russia for 21 days to get to know the child.
It’s good to know that Russian officials aren’t prejudiced against unmarried adopters with colorful sex lives, but I suspect that she might run into problems, given the outcry after Elton John and his husband David Furnish last year offered to adopt a 14-month-old Ukrainian boy called Lev who is infected with HIV. The couple was turned down by officials because they aren’t married under Ukrainian law and because Elton John, 62, is “too old.”